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iOS Developer Tools

I always try to improve my productivity, being more productive means I can spend more time doing stuff I love instead of fighting with bad tools. That’s probably why I spend lots of money on apps, I enjoy supporting great ideas other people have.

I recently gave talk about tools I use and why, read more to see the video and description of each tool.

Initial setup

Crafter

How do you setup your Cocoa projects? Do you always set same warnings, clone configurations and do bunch of other stuff? Or maybe you work in a big company and you are missing some standardised setup?

Programmers tend to automatise boring and repetitive tasks, yet I often see people spending time and time again configuring their Xcode Projects, even thought they always set it up same way.

We all know that Xcode templating system is far from perfect, beside we often use different templates, but same level of warnings, scripts etc.

What if you could define your project setup once (even with optional stuff) then just apply that to all your projects?

That’s why I’ve created Crafter

Icon versioning

Ever had someone testing wrong version of the app? This little build-phase script will let you know if someone is running old version of your application.

Day to day use

AppCode

If you don’t know what AppCode is, you are about to have your world shaken up.

AppCode is probably best IDE I’ve had pleasure to work with, it has extensive amount of small features that will improve your workflow by a ton. Let’s just name a few:

Reliable and efficient refactoring, Xcode can’t even compare.

Code quality tracking beyond just LLVM.

Code navigation that let’s you find contextual uses and much much more.

Diff and merging integrated so well that even Kaleidoscope can’t compare.

Dash

xScope

Great set of tools that can help you save lots of time when working with designs, it can even simulate user vision problems like colour blindness.

UberLayer

Hex Color Picker

Add hex support in all OSX colour pickers, how many times did you get colours in hex and had to use some website to translate that to RGB to use it in Interface Builder? Enough of that.

What The Font

Ever saw a font you loved but could’t find the name? Here’s the tool you need.

Code injection

Great plugin that let’s your recompile single file you are working on. If you do small changes and need to see them running in your app, eg. graphics or physics adjustments this will save you hours .

HockeyCoach

Great way to view crash reports. Connects to your repository and hockey account and gives you great aggregation of crashes, stack traces and many other features. Finding what made the app crash is a lot less painful.

VVDocumenter

This great plugin allows you to add documentation comments in Xcode with ease, it’s like code snippet but on steroids. It grabs names from the code you want documented and enters template for you to fill in.

NSLogger

Best iOS/OSX logger I’ve seen to date, filtering, tagging, logging images and binary data and much much more. All wirelessly over bonjour.

Patterns

Simple but powerful tool for creating regular expressions. I never remember syntax, do you? This makes my life easier.

WatchDog

Ever had problem with wrong symbols? Had to remove derived data as a solution? This little tool will monitor your actions and do proper clean when you clean in Xcode. It can also release lots of space from your Macbook as Derived data tends to grow quite large.

Debugging

Charles

Reveal

Great tool for inspecting UI problems, it can even modify your UI in real-time, thus allowing you to find issues quicker.

Other tools

Wasted

Nice tool that helps to check how much space are your images wasting and optimise it.

We tend to use PNG’s everywhere but that’s not always optimal, this tool will show you why.

Slender

Find unused assets or mismatched dimensions in your apps.

Tokens

This is my favourite tool for redeem codes, great UIX and effective tracking of who and when used your code, if they didn’t you can reuse your code.

RamDisk

Make sure you check out those tools, I’d love to hear your opinions and other tools you find useful.